First and Second Thoughts About Culture and Politics

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Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois demonstrates his concept of representative democracy at a townhall held in a bar in his district last weekend. What exercised the Congressman’s patience was the suggestion, apparently popular among the unrattled attendees, that, as I suggested yesterday, private banks were as much at fault for the depressed or recessed economy as politicians. Walsh displays the Tea Party mindset at its most rigid worst when he asserts that consistency of ideology is more important than accuracy of fact. He doesn’t want the people of his district to forget is that he will not stray from the Tea Party (Republican) line that private interests are more important than the public interest.

The bottom line: The people get it. Some politicians don’t and don’t want to get it.

PS: Perhaps the most astonishing moment of this video is when Walsh says, “”What has made this mess is your government­, which has demanded for many years that everybody be in a home.” Is a Tea Party Republican actually blaming the American dream of universal home ownership for the economic mess? Is he really suggesting that the American dream is the product of government rather than of individuals? Setting aside the question of whether or not this is right, this seems to be a startling position for a conservative, pro-market, pro-individualist to be taking. I wonder if this will be a new shade of conservatism: anti-American Dream libertarianism.

I received an interesting comment from Jan C on the previous post which I’d like to respond to in part here. There’s a lot to unpack in Jan’s comment, so I may take another post to elaborate on the question of “property” vs. “possession” and “use” vs. “usury.” But here I want to address a crucial point Jan made about “the commons” and “the individual.”Continue reading →

Continuing the discussion I began here and continued here, in this installment, I present for your consideration more of the debate I participated in nearly a decade ago over the inherent contradiction in the term “anarcho”-capitalism.

I should say a little more about why this debate remains relevant. If you listen to the rhetoric of some of the “intellectuals” in the Republican party, you will hear echoes of “anarcho”-capitalism’s sacred principles: private property is a natural right; the state is an impediment to freedom; taxation is theft; freedom to associate with persons of one’s choosing is a natural right. Ron Paul‘s Ten Principles of a Free Society almost reads like a Ten Commandments for anarchos. It’s not surprising given that Paul is a Libertarian and “anarcho”-capitalism is also a product of Libertarian philosophizing, is, in fact, Libertarianism taken over the side of the slippery slope. Paul and his son Rand are far from the only Libertarianism-espousing politicians in power. One other very powerful Libertarian in the Republican party is Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, whose budget aims to dump social welfare programs from the government’s repertoire of services for the citizenry. These ideas are as close as they’ve ever been to America’s power center. Are we all comfortable with that? Continue reading →

Continuing from my last post, here reproduced are excerpts from the Usenet debates I had in the summer and fall of 2002, mostly, with self-described “anarcho”-capitalists. The original argument concerned “rights” and “freedom,” but it quickly led, as most debates with “anarchos” go, to the question of property. As I mentioned yesterday, these issues, I believe, lie at the very heart of the debates going on presently over the debt-ceiling (actually over revenues vs. spending) in Congress and the media. But you won’t hear our pundits or politicians for the most part bring it down to the very ground it all springs from. Continue reading →

In the wake of September 11, 2001 and continuing through the lead-up to the Iraq War and into 2003, I was involved in an intense debate on several political Usenet groups (my involvement in political Usenet, actually, goes back to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1997-1998), in which there was a clique of rabidly right wing libertarians holding forth on what they called “anarcho-capitalism.” Many believe that the only logical conclusion to right libertarianism (and to history, actually) is capitalism completely unfettered by government. In a sense, they’re right (except for the history part): If you think government is bad for business and you think business is the best way to distribute resources, then the best government is no government at all. Of course a lot of Libertarians believe government is necessary to provide for the defense of business interests, but the anarchos would argue that if businesses need to be defended, they should do it themselves. Abolish government, they say, abolish borders, open all the world to capitalism. Let the market determine the value of everything. Continue reading →